Paper Reading 24: A Natural Language Interface of Thorough Coverage by Concordance with Knowledge Bases

Reference Information:

Title: A Natural Language Interface of Thorough Coverage by Concordance with Knowledge Bases
Names of authors: Yong-Jin Han, Tae-Gil Noh, Seong-Bae Park, Se Young Park, Sang-Jo Lee
Presentation venue: IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces

Summary:

One of the critical problems in natural language interfaces is the discordance between the expressions covered by the interface and those by the knowledge base. In the graph- based knowledge base such as an ontology, all possible queries can be prepared in advance. As a solution of the discordance problem in natural language interfaces, this paper proposes a method that translates a natural language query into a formal language query such as SPARQL. In this paper, a user query is translated into a formal language by choosing the most appropriate query from the prepared queries. The experimental results show a high accuracy and coverage for the

given knowledge base.

Figure 1. Mismatch between expressions which are interpretable by a

NLI system and those answerable by a knowledge base.

Discussion:

The paper was fairly easy to understand, however, it is important to know what a natural language and a formal language is before reading this paper. Natural Language processing was something that we used in information storage and retrieval class. We used a toolkit called NLTK - Natural Language Tool Kit. Natural Language processing also has many application in the field of AI. The idea of translating a user query into a formal language by choosing the most appropriate query from the prepared queries is very novel and interesting.